Cool Home: Putting their own signature on a new build in historic Roosevelt neighborhood

• With their children grown, Dr. Stephanie Eastman and Denis Gillingwater moved downtown
• The pair ended up in a new build in the historic Roosevelt district off Third Avenue on Lynwood
• Phoenix architect Clyde Rousseau designed the tall, light green stucco home

About 12 years ago, Dr. Stephanie Eastman and Denis Gillingwater agreed they needed to move to downtown Phoenix. At the time, the couple was living on a large lot in north Scottsdale, where they had raised their two daughters. But with both girls in college and the area losing “all of our ‘Ma and Pa’ places,” as Denis put it, the two found themselves making the journey downtown more and more often.

“We (were) coming downtown quite a bit for the restaurants, ballpark and galleries,” Denis recalls. So they asked each other, “Why are we driving all the way down here? We could live here!”

After looking at dozens of homes in downtown’s old neighborhoods the pair ended up in a new build in Phoenix’s historic Roosevelt district off Third Avenue on Lynwood. Their home — a tall light green stucco, two bed/two-and-a-half bath, designed by noted Phoenix architect Clyde Rousseau — is a bit unexpected at the end of a wide palm-lined street filled with 1930s bungalows.

Architecht's signature

But Denis, a now-retired professor of art at Arizona State University, says they met the architect before buying and, as a fellow artist, appreciated that Rousseau had a signature design and vision for the home.

“We’ve tried to keep his signature,” says Stephanie, a recently-retired naturopathic doctor. Plus, Rousseau, who also designed the three other homes on this lot, has experience integrating new buildings with existing architecture. The result in this instance is a house that feels at once custom and fresh but still fluid with its surroundings in a new neighborhood.

Very tall ceilings on the first and second floors give room for impossibly long windows framed by copper curtain rods. And pops of colorful tile are carried throughout the home, from the large fireplace in the living room to the kitchen back splash to the built in barbecue outside on the patio.

Other than adding a massive copper-topped island to the kitchen and a mellow tiled water wall to their patio, Denis and Stephanie haven’t changed much of the architect’s original vision.

“You walk into a place and you’re like, ‘This is it!’” Stephanie says of knowing when you’re home.

Interior

Inside the home, the decor is an amalgamation of Stephanie and Denis as a couple, with antique furnings and artwork they either made or inherited from their families. The result is a mixture of the practical and utilitarian — coming from Stephanie, who ran her naturopathic clinic out of the house for several years — and the artistic, from Denis who was raised by two artists.

“It’s eclectic,” she says of their style, but it works.

On the vintage side, there’s a pinkish couch in the living room that once sat in Stephanie’s father’s office in Rockefeller Center in the 1950s in New York and a Coromandel Chinese folding screen that belonged to her mother.

These big antique pieces are offset with contemporary accents like a Noguchi coffee table and a wall of black and white prints Denis made by accessing public surveillance cameras around the world and printing stills of night scenes from Oslo, Tokyo and Santiago.

They’ve integrated themselves so much into this house, Stephanie says, that it’s hard for her to picture ever leaving.

“It would have to be really special,” she says. “This house, for us, is a part of us.”

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